House Tour: Back Porch
When we bought this house last fall, the screened-in back porch was one of the things I loved most about this home.
And all spring and summer, we used it non-stop. My girls ate many of their lunches out there and they played there constantly.
But it wasn’t even remotely decorated or particularly nice.
It’s all covered in green industrial carpet (Bart, looking closely at it one time, said “This is what you’d get if you could apply carpet via spray paint.”).
The rug that had been in my office got rolled up and put out there for months and months and months.
And the basket chair that had hung in Ella’s room in our Arizona house sat in the corner where anyone who casually tried to sit in it immediately tipped over with a crash.
Not to mention that the wood floor we’d uncovered had several boards at the doorway on the inside that were completely destroyed decades earlier, so you were stepping over some good-size missing chunks that collected all sorts of crumbs and other debris.
It needed some help.
Once the floors were repaired, sanded and sealed, it felt like it might be time to get to work on the back porch.
The carpet isn’t going anywhere for now, but I’m so used to it I don’t even notice it, as long as I keep it vacuumed.
The first item of business was to get a stand for the chair (the roof of this screened in porch doesn’t lend itself to hanging a large basket chair from). I ordered it from Amazon and it arrived a few days later. To my delight, Bart assembled it THAT evening when he got home from work and we finally rolled out the rug.
It already looked SO MUCH BETTER.
The next thing I was dying to do was hang bistro lights around the perimeter of the porch. Especially because you can see it both from the kitchen windows and the dining room doors, I thought it’d look so cozy and special.
I bought several packs of these clear hooks and mounted 32 of them around the edge of my porch and then strung the lights around those. I might still add a few more to help them hang even straighter, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet.
The lights fit almost PERFECTLY around the porch and I bought a 3 foot extension cord to run from the end of the light string down to the outlet.
And I added a smart plug and connected it to our Echo so that I could just turn on and off the lights without going outside.
Best choice ever.
I LOVE how convenient that is.
I also hung up a bluetooth speaker so we can listen to music out there. THAT is fun too.
Even if the back porch isn’t perfect yet, it’s delightful to see so much progress and it’s so fun to have it even more useful now.
Wow. Looks great and like it is already being well used. I am impressed at the way you found ways to make things you already had work in a new environment. Can’t wait to see it in person.